In April 1945, as the war in Europe was winding down, infantryman James Ray Clark
found himself in the midst of a scene more horrific than any he had witnessed in combat.
What he and his fellow soldiers thought was a slave labor camp was actually
Buchenwald, a concentration camp that housed, among many other starving Jews and
"undesirables," the teenaged Elie Wiesel. Clark's unblinking descriptions of the "walking
dead" he tried to help there are both horrifying and heartbreaking. He proudly recalls that
many years later, in 1983, Wiesel presented him with a signed scroll in appreciation of
the U.S. Army's liberation efforts.